In various business enterprises the organizational structure of the enterprise, the business processes it performs, and the products it produces are supported by information technology (IT), applications and services. An example for such support is the IT application Lotus Notes used by the organization Business Unit Consumer Products in the business process Marketing Campaign Management. Enterprises spend a massive amount of resources on information technology to support their business, but major inefficiencies exist today due to sub-optimal methods employed in planning such support.
In the prior art, techniques exist to represent and visualize the support that IT applications provide for organizational units in performing their business processes. The primary means of such visualization are business support maps, which represent the supporting relation using a matrix structure with the supported elements constituting the axes of the matrix and the supporting elements placed in matrix cells at the appropriate locations. FIG. 1 is an example of a business support map that visualizes IT support for organizational units in performing business processes, according to the prior art. As shown in FIG. 1, the X-axis of the matrix shows business processes, while the Y-axis shows organizational units. The placement of the element Lotus Notes in the cell corresponding to business process Marketing Campaign Management on the X-axis and to organizational unit Business Unit Consumer Products on the Y-axis represents the support of said organizational unit in performing the business process by the Lotus Notes IT application.
Use of business support maps to document and communicate the support of IT applications for the enterprise business architecture is common practice. However, this practice is based on manual creation and maintenance of such business support maps using tools like Microsoft PowerPoint, effectively creating business support maps as drawings with no associated data on the underlying IT applications, organizations, business processes, and their mutual relations. Consequently, such drawings are not related to each other, but exist as independent pieces of information.
This common practice approach has a number of drawbacks. For instance, business support maps need to be created and updated manually, which is time consuming and error prone. Moreover, no direct links are available from a business support map to the underlying information for drill-down (e.g., to understand details of an IT application that is shown as providing support), and no mutual consistency checks across multiple such maps are possible. Further, time-based planning of the evolution of the IT support of the enterprise business architecture relies on a series of unrelated drawings, making the planning process opaque, tedious, and error prone. Finally, modifying plans requires updating a number of drawings and documents, as these are technically independent of each other.
Techniques also exist to establish a planning regime that institutionalizes and guides the planning of future IT support of the enterprise business architecture. The aim of such a regime is to define guidelines and long-term targets for future IT support (e.g., by dictating that in 2010, all business processes related to marketing shall be supported by a specific IT application from a specific vendor) to coordinate, review, and consolidate the plans for IT support that are made in operational planning activities, and to establish full transparency of the current, planned, and long-term target status of the IT support.
The prior art techniques employed to establish such planning regimes rely on: the definition of long-term targets for IT support by a small group of enterprise architects, the documentation of such targets in the form of business support map drawings, and the dissemination of this information in the form of documents or pictures to planners performing operational planning. Moreover, the prior art techniques rely on the conception of future IT support in the scope of operational planning, the documentation of such plans in the form of business support map drawings, and the submission of such drawings to respective review boards or central groups for review. Also relied on in the prior art is the publication of approved long-term and operational plans in the form of documents or pictures (e.g., using content management systems and intranet publication) to inform all stakeholders and the establishment of policies and processes to enforce the detailed planning and review procedures.
The combination of the above techniques to establish planning regimes suffer from serious difficulties. For instance, communication among stakeholders in the process is based on documents or pictures that are not associated with an underlying database of record, effectively rendering every document an island of information without any semantic relation among such documents. Consequently, mutual consistency of operational plans or compliance with target plans need to be verified manually by reading and reviewing a great number of documents and drawings without any assistance from an automated system. This process is labor intensive and error prone. Further, the rate of change of such documents and drawings and the huge number of plans in larger enterprises render the outcome of the approach grossly suboptimal. Also, the publication of a consolidated view on the current, planned, and target state of the IT support for the enterprise business architecture is limited to a fragmented collection of documents and drawings, which are not consolidated into a coherent whole.
Effectively, the prior art techniques fail to achieve their goal of coordinating and directing the planning process of future IT support. They especially fall short in ensuring consistency of plans, both mutual consistency of operational plans and consistency with target plans. These shortcomings contribute significantly to the major inefficiencies in the use of IT to support the business.